A great piece from the NYT, titled “Windows Is So Slow - but Why?” (needs subscription), which highlights that because Microsoft makes Windows backward compatible, i.e. that old software can run on new versions of Windows, it gets clunkier n clunkier as they update it with new features. And that was a long sentence.
Driving back from Oxford to London last night, I experimented with driving at different engine RPMs to see how it effected the fuel efficiency. As it turns out, 3,000rpm was almost 40% more fuel efficient than 5,000rpm, and at least about 15% more efficient than 4,000rpm. That may seem obvious, but I always thought going faster was more fuel efficient. Silly me.
Here’s what Wired have to say: “By coasting when possible, not gunning it off the line, and slowing to a stop instead of slamming on the brakes, it’s easy to add anywhere from 1-7 miles per gallon to your fuel economy.”
Congratulations to Harj for getting to the Graduate of the Year Final.
“For Taggar, 20, from Slough, it has meant working flat out during term-time and resting during the holidays. “You have eight to 10 weeks of being incredibly busy. I just pack in as much as I can. You have to be prepared not to sleep very much,” he says.
I know you hate the self-publicity, but hey, well done!
Shout out to Kirill as well, for also getting to the final, OE rocks! 
Update: Kirill won! Congratulations!
Boso.co.uk is the UK’s first online marketplace created and run by students, exclusively for students. The site continues to become more popular with over 2,000 students now using boso to trade items between themselves, from all across the country. From iPods to Gucci cocktail dresses to books all about Tax law, students are saving money every day on all kinds of things.
Boso is now at a critical stage in its growth:
- we are being filmed by Channel 4 for the next six months, as part of their new series of ‘Tricky Business’
- we are also delighted that the high-profile serial entrepreneur Graham Beswick has joined our management team, to provide us with some much needed experience and business know-how
- our website is being redeveloped by Groovytrain, one of the top web-development agencies in the country with clients including Adidas, Patek Philippe and Mulberry, so we are working hard in the background to improve on the current site (which, to be honest, doesn’t take much!)
and so we are looking for people to join our team.
We’re looking for people who will initially be paid on a commission basis to market the site directly to students around their campus. We’re not just looking for dummies though, we want people who have the drive to become long term members of the boso family. We’re ideally looking for these skills:
> Outgoing with great communication skills
> Willing to think outside of the box (whatever that actually means)
> Previous marketing experience not necessary but strong links around campus (student newspapers, student organisations etc) would be ideal
> Sense of humour absolutely essential
> An unhealthy obsession with comic book characters
You’ll have the complete independence to approach the marketing challenge as you wish, pay will be based on performance which is measured by the number of new users and items posted each week on the site. We’d love to meet you to chat about this in more detail, please email kul [at] boso.co.uk to arrange a time to meet and talk through the details.
Our second opportunity is for people with some spare time over Easter and looking for an internship. With the milkround becoming ever more competitive, you’re probably desperate to make your CV stand out from the rest. Well nothing will stand out more than having spent 2 weeks working with a start-up company that is not only innovative (the first online student marketplace in the UK) but has attracted great press coverage from the Guardian, Times, BBC, Evening Standard and more.
Intern responsibilities will involve (in addition to making coffee, tea, lunch and dinner):
> Researching our main growth opportunities, especially looking at existing infrastructures at other universities
> Providing input on how to increase our revenue and using this to further accelerate our growth
> Using your own initiative to develop any proposals/campaigns you think can take the company forward
We are essentially looking for someone who is smart, enthusiastic and reliable. You can define the role as you wish to help you acquire whichever skills you’re interested in. Expenses will be provided for. Please email kul [at] boso.co.uk for further details.
I actually just knuckled down and went through each member in our database, and was surprised to find the breadth of institutions we have members from! They include, as of 16 March 2006:
Bath
Birmingham
Bournemouth
Bradford
Brighton
Bristol
Cambridge
Canterbury
City
De Montfort
Derby
Durham
Edinburgh
Essex
Exeter
Glasgow
Greenwich
Harvard
Heriot-Watt, Edinburgh
Hertfordshire
Huddersfield
Hull
Imperial
Institute of Education, London
Keele
King’s
Liverpool
London College of Fashion
London Metropolitan
LSE
Loughborough
Luton
Manchester
Manchester Metropolitan
Marjon College
Middlesex
Newcastle Upon Tyne
North East Surrey College of Technology
Northumbria
Nottingham
Open University
Oxford
Oxford Brookes
Oxford Institute of Legal Practice
Portsmouth
Queen Mary’s
Queen’s University, Belfast
Royal Veterinary College
Ruskin’s College, Oxford
Salford
Sheffield
SOAS
Southampton
Swansea
Technology Innovation Centre, Birmingham
UCL
Warwick
Wiltshire College
Wolverhampton
Update: We just had a sign up from University of Strathclyde, so that’s now 60!
Courtesy of Richard Price, again.
1.) www.riya.com, great facial recognition technology for photos. you upload all your photos, ‘educate’ it a bit by telling who is who in some photos, and then it recognizes where those people appear in other photos and labels them. apparently 35 billion photos are going to be taken by mobile phone cameras this year so the photo industry is a very exciting place to be!
2.) Toshiba’s plan is that you take a photo of a bar code of a product, and then toshiba looks up comments on that product on blogs and sends your phone ratings of the product and blog comments.
3.) www.dpolls.com, this is a technology that allows you to run a poll on your website, free and no hassle.
4.) www.hamachi.cc, this allows you to set up a secure network over the internet between family/colleagues etc so you can securely share files etc.
5.) www.yousendit.com, this allows you to email files of up to 1GB. Basically you upload the file to the site, enter the email address, and the recipient gets a link to the site where they can download the file from.
6.) retrievr, you draw a picture on the site and the site retrieves photos from flickr that resemble what you’ve drawn. It seems a useful way of searching through the flickr database.
7.) www.echosign.com, you email an agreement to someone that you need to be signed; they fax it to your special echosign fax number; echosign automatically turns the fax into a pdf and emails it to you so you get an easier-to-manage soft copy.
Something else I found off Evan’s blog:
Two useful links from possibly the best blog on the internet:
1. Ten rules for web startups
2. Running your company on web apps
Boso currently uses Jotspot for our project management, thanks to Evan’s post, and, it rocks.
As compiled and sent to me by Richard Price.
“1.) Online word processing app so people in different places can collaborate on the same document www.writely.com (just bought by google).
2.) A way of inviting people to events that’s more efficient than email www.skobee.com.
3.) Google Drive: google’s project to have unlimited file storage for any kind of file; basically you can have your hard-drive online.
4.) A site where people can swap CDs and so never have to buy them: www.lala.com (however www.allofmp3.com is far better because you can download any album for 80p). lala’s got a great logo though. www.peerflix.com is the same kind of swapping site for DVDs.
5.) A ticket search site where you can see what the cheapest destinations to fly to are, and the cheapest days to fly on www.flyspy.com.
6.) www.allpeers.com; this is an extension to firefox allowing you to share with your friends information about which files you’ve downloaded. Looks fantastic to me! in fact it would save us emailing these sites around: we could just create a friend list for internet entrepreneurs and put our favourite sites in there whenever we came across them, and everyone else in the group would be able to view them.
7.) www.textpayme.com; this is a currently-free way to send money to a friend via text message…neat!”
On the last point, I’d add that Mobile Sense is a UK based startup that does the same thing, though I think the user interface needs some improvement.
Cheers Rich!
“In the flow state, Csikszentmihalyi found, people engage so completely in what they are doing that they lose track of time. Hours pass in minutes. All sense of self recedes. At the same time, they are pushing beyond their limits and developing new abilities. Indeed, the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to capacity.”
These words, written by American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, describe the state of “flow” - a condition of heightened focus, productivity, and happiness that happens you work on something you are enthusiastic about. I remember a management lecture at Oxford where it was said the key to leading people and increasing productivity was bringing the ‘logic of person’ into the ‘logic of position’.
Click here for the article from FastCompany.com.
